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Amnesiac
Next album - Hail to the Thief Last album - Kid A ''Amnesiac ''is the fifth album by RH, released on 4th June, 2001, through Parlophone. It went at number 2 on the US Billboard 200, and number 1 in the UK. Three singles were released from the album, which were Pyramid Song, I Might Be Wrong and Knives Out, as well as the I Might Be Wrong live album. The album was re-issued on vinyl in 2008, and the year afterwards the Collectors Edition was released which has all the Amnesiac ''B-sides on and some live stuff. Recording ''Amnesiac ''was recorded at the same time as ''Kid A ''between January 1999 and 2000 in Paris and their hometown Oxford, and it was recorded in 18 months. They managed to finish more than thirty songs during the sessions. RH thought about releasing these songs as a series of EP's or as a double album, but they could not decide on a track listing and decided against the idea. Thom said that it was "because they cannot run in a straight line with each other. They cancel each other out as overall finished things. They come from two different places, I think... In some weird way I think Amnesiac gives another take on Kid A, a form of explanation." Ed said that "The tendency with a double album is that if there's quite dense material in there, you tend to skip it, you tend to move on. We realised that maybe at first listen it wouldn't come to you, but it warranted coming back to. It wouldn't have happened if we put it on a double album." The band said that it wasn't a collection of leftovers from ''Kid A and that it was an album in its own right. The only song they recorded for the album after the sessions was "Life in a Glasshouse". Johnny asked Humphrey Lyttelton if he could play trumpet on the song which he agreed to. Music and lyrics For Kid A ''and ''Amnesiac, Ed wanted to make like 3 minute guitar poppy songs, but Thom said that he had "completely had it with melody. I just wanted rhythm." And like Kid A, it was all electronic all sorts of other elements of music. Thom said this about the lyrics: "I read that the gnostics believe when we are born we are forced to forget where we have come from in order to deal with the trauma of arriving in this life. I thought this was really fascinating. It's like the river of forgetfulness. Amnesiac may have been recorded at the same time Kid A... but it comes from a different place I think. It sounds like finding an old chest in someone's attic with all these notes and maps and drawings and descriptions of going to a place you cannot remember." The first song on the album is "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box" which was made from compressed loops and the singing manipulated with auto-tune. The second song is "Pyramid Song", which "Freedom" by Charles Mingus inspired the song. Thom even copied the claps in that song on PS but he thought it didnt sound very good. It was inspired by an exhibition of ancient Egyptian underworld art that Thom went to when recording in Paris. He said "Stephen Hawking talks about the theory that time is another force, that time is completely cyclical (...) It's something that I found in Buddhism as well. That's what 'Pyramid Song' is about, the fact that everything is going in circles." The third song, "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors", was built on a Roland MC-505 sequencer. Colin said "we set up these tape recorders and we disabled the erase heads. We stuck the record head so it kept on recording over and over on top of itself and played keyboard notes into it to create this ghost repetition melody." they used auto-tune again which he said "You give the machine a key and then you just talk into it. It desperately tries to search for the music in your speech, and produces notes at random. If you've assigned it a key, you've got music." Thom said "You and Whose Army?" was "about someone who is elected into power by people and who then blatantly betrays them – just like Blair did." The lyric "never look back" in "I Might Be Wrong" came from when Thom's partner said "Be proud of what you've done. Don't look back and just carry on like nothing's happened. Just let the bad stuff go." Ed and Thom said "Knives Out " took 373 days to record which Thom said "We just lost our nerve. It was so straight-ahead. We thought, 'We've gotta put that in the bin, it's too straight.' We couldn't possibly do anything that straight until we'd gone and been completely arse about face with everything else, in order to feel good about doing something straight like that. It took 373 days to be arse-about-face enough to realise it was alright the way it was." Thom has also said that KO was "partly the idea of the businessman walking out on his wife and kids and never coming back. It's also the thousand yard stare when you look at someone close to you and you know they're gonna die. It's like a shadow over them, or the way they look straight through you. The shine goes out of their eyes." "Morning Bell/Amnesiac" is a different version of Morning Bell from Kid A, which Ed said "We often record different versions of songs and the new one is the first time it has been strong enough to bear hearing again. Most of the other versions often get scrapped halfway through." Thom said it was put on the album "because it came from such a different place from the other version. Because we only found it again by accident after having forgotten about it. Because it sounds like a recurring dream. It felt right." "Dollars & Cents" was originally 11 minutes long but was then edited down to just almost 5 minutes. Thom said "The lyrics are gibberish but they come out of ideas I've been fighting with for ages about how people are basically just pixels on a screen, unknowingly serving this higher power which is manipulative and destructive, but we're powerless because we can't name it." "Like Spinning Plates" was made from parts of their song "I Will", which they werent satisfied with. RH reversed "I Will" to make a new song, which Thom said "We'd turned the tape around, and I was in another room, heard the vocal melody coming backwards, and thought, 'That's miles better than the right way round', then spent the rest of the night trying to learn the melody." The last song is "Life in a Glasshouse", which Thom said the line "she is papering the window panes / she is putting on a smile" were inspired by "this interview with the wife of a very famous actor who the tabloids completely hounded for three months like dogs from hell. She got the copies of the papers with her picture and she posted them up all over the house, over all the windows so that all the cameras that were outside on her lawn only had their own images to photograph. I thought that was brilliant, and that's where the song started from." Artwork The artwork for the album was done by Thom and Stanley Donwood (whos done all of RH's artwork with Thom except for Pablo Honey.) The cover has, obviously, a red library book against a black background but the creature on the cover is a minotaur whos crying. Stanley said the artwork came from "taking the train to London, getting lost and taking notes," as in that London was like a labyrinth, saying it was like "an imaginary prison, a place where you can walk around and you are the Minotaur of London, we are all the monsters, we are all half human half beast. We are trapped in this maze of this past." There was a limited CD version of the album made, which was basically the book on the cover of Amnesiac. Stanley said "We wanted it to be a like a book. And someone made these pages in a book and it went into drawer in a desk and was forgotten about in the attic. And the attic was then forgotten. And visually and musically the album is about finding the book and opening the pages." It actually won a Grammy for Best Recording Package. Release On the 21st May, 2001, the first single from the album was released worldwide (except for the US) which was for "Pyramid Song" as a 2 CD single and 12" vinyl. A promo EP called College EP ''was released too which had the PS B-sides on it and had the same artwork. Anyways, PS managed to go at number two in Canada, and number five in the UK the next month, and in May they played the song on Top of the Pops. On the 4th June, a US radio-only single before the album was released, and it charted at number 27 in the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks. The next day, on the 4th June, ''Amnesiac ''was released into the world on CD, cassette and double 10" vinyl. The album went straight to number one in the UK Albums Chart on the 16th June, and two in the US Billboard 200. The next week, it went to number seven in the UK and then fell down to number fourteen. However, on the 6th July it was certified gold, and has since went platinum. It was nominated for a Mercury Prize, but lost to ''Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea by PJ Harvey, which Thom also had sang on. On the 6th August, the third and last single from the album was released for "Knives Out". The single charted at number thirteen in the UK, and number one in Canada for four weeks. On the 12th November, RH released a live album called I Might Be Wrong which was recorded on a tour of Europe and North America between the 28th May 2001 and the 20th August. Track listing Original release #Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box - 4:00 #Pyramid Song - 4:48 #Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors - 4:07 #You And Whose Army? - 3:11 #I Might Be Wrong - 4:53 #Knives Out - 4:14 #Morning Bell / Amnesiac - 3:14 #Dollars And Cents - 4:51 #Hunting Bears - 2:01 #Like Spinning Plates - 3:57 #Life In A Glasshouse - 4:34 2009 Collectors Edition #The Amazing Sounds of Orgy - 3:38 #Trans-Atlantic Drawl - 3:01 #Fast-Track - 3:17 #Kinetic - 4:06 #Worrywort - 4:37 #Fog - 4:04 #Cuttooth - 5:23 #Life in a Glasshouse (full length version) - 5:08 #You and Whose Army? (live at Canal+ Studios, Paris) - 3:18 #Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box (live at Canal+ Studios, Paris) - 3:04 #Dollars & Cents (live at Canal+ Studios, Paris) - 4:41 #I Might Be Wrong (live at Canal+ Studios, Paris) - 4:55 #Knives Out (live at Canal+ Studios, Paris) - 4:22 #Pyramid Song (live at Canal+ Studios, Paris) - 5:07 #Like Spinning Plates (live) - 3:52 Collectors Edition DVD #Pyramid Song #Knives Out #I Might Be Wrong #Push Pulk/Spinning Plates #Pyramid Song (live on Top of the Pops) #Knives Out (live on Top of the Pops) #Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box (live on Later with Jools Holland – 09/06/01) #Knives Out (live on Later with Jools Holland) #Life in a Glasshouse (live on Later with Jools Holland) #I Might Be Wrong (live on Later with Jools Holland) Credits ;Radiohead *Colin Greenwood *Jonny Greenwood *Ed O'Brien *Phil Selway *Thom Yorke All songs written by RH Other musicians *The Orchestra of St. Johns conducted by John Lubbock – strings on "Pyramid Song" and "Dollars and Cents" On "Life in a Glasshouse" *Paul Bridge – double bass *Jimmy Hastings – clarinet *Humphrey Lyttelton – trumpet and bandleader *Adrian Macintosh – drums *Pete Strange – trombone Artwork/production *Stanley Donwood – cover art and packaging *Nigel Godrich – production and engineering *Dan Grech-Marguerat – engineering on "Life in a Glasshouse" *Gerard Navarro – engineering *Graeme Stewart – engineering Charts Amnesiac Gallery *'Full Amnesiac Gallery' Radiohead.amnesiac.albumart.jpg|Cover R-267133-1230476772.jpeg|CD back R-267133-1231537281.jpeg|CD R-173980-1385277715-2569.jpeg|Vinyl front R-173980-1385277720-3868.jpeg|Vinyl back R-173980-1385277725-9103.jpeg|Side A R-173980-1385277731-8868.jpeg|Side B R-173980-1385277736-6192.jpeg|Side C R-173980-1385277742-8588.jpeg|Side D R-3300905-1388710413-8284.jpeg|Cassette Limited_edition_album_Amnesiac_by_Radiohead.jpg|Limited Amnesiac book R-71978-1085242340.jpg|Sealed book